Friday Wrap-up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. Marketing Automation – Lessons Learned

This post from Marketo caught me a bit by surprise – in a really good way. You can find countless blogs, FAQs, data sheets, etc. that cover best practices when you’re using marketing automation tools (for equally countless applications, for that matter), but it’s not often you see a deep examination of the underlying processes and strategies you need to have in place for those systems and tools to truly be effective. This guest post from BrightCarbon’s Joby Blume does just that. Marketing Automation – Lessons Learned

2. The Ultimate Glossary of Performance Metrics Every Marketer Should Know

Although the exact marketing data you track can and should be dictated by your strategy, it never hurts to have a reference of just about every KOI under the sun. From overall funnel metrics to SEO to PR and Branding, this post from HubSpot dives into more than 30 key marketing metrics you can use to track, adjust, and improve your marketing campaigns. FYI, this is one of those posts you’ll probably want to bookmark. The Ultimate Glossary of Performance Metrics Every Marketer Should Know

3. P.S. Five Tips to Increase Email Click-Through Rates

Although best practices have long dictated that the most effective marketing messages are those that are written as a one-to-one communication rather than one-to-many, there’s no question that most emails sent from marketing organizations, by and large, still fall into the latter camp and, as such, really stink. This post from MarketingProfs gives you another reason to craft your messages as a dialogue between you and one reader and provides five ways you can boost the performance of your emails through the use of the postscript. P.S. Five Tips to Increase Email Click-Through Rates

4. The Most Important YouTube Metric Isn’t What You Think

We’ve had numerous conversations around the ReachForce office lately working up ideas for content, publishing cadence, and channels with our videos. We’re also making sure we’re purposeful with those ideas – that each video is produced for a specific, measurable reason that has a straight line back to strategy and, ultimately, revenue. This post Ryan Stephens Marketing provides insight into one metric you should fold into your planning and strategy if you’re doing the same – and it isn’t the number of views your video gets. The Most Important YouTube Metric Isn’t What You Think